Lawyers for Kanye West filed cease-and-desist papers against the seven anonymous coders behind Coinye West, a virtual currency that went from chatroom joke to Internet sensation last week.

Kanye, not Coinye

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The legal document, dated Jan. 6, includes an image of Coinye – a cartoon representation of West on a gold medallion. West’s lawyer argues trademark infringement.

“Given Mr. West’s wide-ranging entrepreneurial accomplishments, consumers are likely to mistakenly believe that Mr. West is the source of your services,” wrote Brad Rose, a partner at Pryor Cashman LLP, which has previously worked for West.

Hoping to keep pace with the self-assured, brash West, the techies aren’t backing down. Instead, they are moving up Coinye’s release date to as early as Tuesday night. Looking for surer footing, they changed the name of the currency from Coinye West to just “Coinye” and moved their website from a .com domain name to one registered in India.

“We want to release this to the public before the man can try to crush it,” one of the coders said in a Skype text interview Monday night. “They’ll still come after us, but that’s OK.”

So, how did the world-famous rapper get in a legal feud with seven nerds who refuse to share their names or locations?

As virtual currencies like bitcoin and litecoin have taken off, copycats have emerged. Some offer slight tweaks to the bitcoin code to account for fraudsters or improve transactions. Others, such as BBQcoin and dogecoin, appear more as jokes than legitimate crypto-currencies.

Still, the proliferation of virtual coin prompted the group of seven coders to ask themselves, what else could you name a virtual coin? “We said Coinye West and we were like, ‘Holy… we gotta make that,’” one of them said.

The Internet, predictably, became obsessed. West, an internationally known “musical artist, songwriter, producer, film director and fashion designer,” stayed silent, according to his lawyer. Rose didn’t return a request for comment.

In writing, Rose requested that the people behind Coinye stop using the name or any variation of it, hand over their website and deactivate Facebook and Twitter accounts for Coinye.

If they don’t comply, Rose threatened to “notify the cryptocurrency community at large of your infringing actions and pursue all legal remedies against any business that accepts the purported COINYE WEST currency.”

As with any virtual currency, there is a chance Coinye could take off if Internet users decide it has value. And the spat with West will certainly give Coinye extra publicity.

Or as West once sang: “That that don’t kill me can only make me stronger.”